Looking for old satellite images

January 27, 2009 10:54 AM

Searching for historical satellite images?

I'm looking for an online way to obtain historical satellite images (ideally, for three months of 2008) for a particular county in Massachusetts- I can narrow it down to one particular NOS station that I really care about, but that's not helping my search. I've been driving myself crazy on the NASA, NOAA, and Mass GIS sites, and am just not finding what I'm looking for. Any ideas?

posted by banjo_and_the_pork to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You should check with an aerial photography company; they usually have images on file sorted by date that you can purchase, though if you're wanting the whole county that could be cost prohibitive.
posted by crapmatic at 11:04 AM on January 27, 2009

Have you tried Terraserver? Your needs may be too specific but they have loads of aerial and satellite imagery.

The Geospatial Data Gateway could be useful too.
posted by elendil71 at 11:34 AM on January 27, 2009

You could also try WIST.

If you could tell us bit more about what type of images your looking for, what you'd like to use them for or what satellite in particular you're looking for, we might be able to be more specific.
posted by mollweide at 11:38 AM on January 27, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks! This is for work, so I unfortunately can't get any more specific than that, but Wist and the Geospatial gateway look promising.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 11:52 AM on January 27, 2009

In addition to the above, I'm often able to get historical images from the city I'm doing the work in; you could check with the cities and/or county. The state Department of Transportation also has historical aerials (though the coverage seems to be limited to areas along DOT roads).
posted by curie at 12:48 PM on January 27, 2009

Landsat?
posted by media_itoku at 4:20 PM on January 27, 2009

The easiest way to browse imagery from NASA satellites (presuming you want Landsat, but ~2003 on is visibly degraded by a bad scan-line corrector, so try a few others, like Aster) is the GLOVIS tool (requires Java).
posted by zachxman at 4:11 AM on January 28, 2009